05 April 2012

Welcome to Hogwarts Correspondence School: A Harry Potter Unit Study

To encourage my 6 year old son who is not too enthusiastic about school, I've come up with a way to add a bit of interest-based learning to his lessons. The kids love Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone movie. We do read aloud on Fridays, but I wanted to add a bit more. I found the Hogwarts Summer Correspondence Course at Yahoo Groups. It's a huge database of lesson plans and forms from other moms that use this during the summer for fun and learning. I wanted to use the lessons in the afternoon for science and other things we need to do anyway. Just turning it into a magical Hogwarts experience could be enough to keep him interested. So here's what I have so far.

1. Join HSCS groups - all of them. There's a lot of info, so be prepared to spend an entire day just sifting through the vast amounts of zip files.
2. Download the first year starter packet. This has the invitation letter to the correspondence course, acceptance letters, course selection, sorting questions, house letter and rules.
3. Customize your letters from the starter pack.
4. Organize the courses you would like to cover. These are mine:

First Years Introductory Lessons

Wands and Woods - Learn about trees then make your own wand at the end of the course.

Care of Magical Creatures: Familiars - Learn about toads, cats and owls. Dissect owl pellets. Learn about each animals habitats, what they eat, where they live and more. They get to choose a stuffed familiar when the course is complete.

House Lessons - One of the first courses - studying the origin of each house, what character traits they represent, our own house lessons and rules, bullies.

Herbology - A nature study on plants, grow our own herbs, a trip to the botanical gardens, I have a fungi and bacteria kit to use from Magic School Bus Science. There's also A Fungus Among Us at Currclick.

Transfiguration - Learn about the metamorphosis of butterflies, grow crystals (?), still working on this one.

1 Comments.:

I think I am going to use this for my 6 year old son as well. We just started homeschool and I'm struggling. Right now I'm doing week to week planning which is very taxing on both of us. I think that this could be a great jumpstart into the next step. I am going to gather everything, take a short break and jump right in. Thanks for the ideas and links!